POCEH, thank you again.
I realize now that I've started this question in the Converter topic but should have probably posted under Workstation and I regret the confusion this may have caused.
However, I understand your point about Workstation not normally needing to treat USB hard drives as physical drives since vm guests can access as a passthrough. That's right of course. My case is that I'm trying to follow this advice, which I've seen from other posts here, to convert the contents of a hard drive from a failed system to a vmdk
1- attach the disk in a USB enclosure to a host with Workstation
2- create new VM and add the USB-disk as physical disk - name the vmdk "import.vmdk"
3- do not start the VM
4- clone the "import.vmdk" with vmware-vdiskmanager
vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -r "import.vmdk" -t 0 "new.vmdk"
5- in the VM replace "import.vmdk" with "new.vmdk"
6- start Converter and run "configure machine" against the VM
7- when that is done you can start the VM for the first time
I'm still stuck on the second step. I've seen this advice so many times that I just accepted that Workstation would allow step 2, but if it is not designed to do it, I'll accept that and move on to discover other solutions to image the drive into a .vmdk for the Converter. I believe you must be right that Converter won't convert a USB disk, but fortunately I don't have that particular problem. I'm hoping there is a trick to step 2 that someone who has done p2v conversion this way might be able to spot. Is it truly not possible for Workstation to add a USB-connected disk as a physical drive to a vm, or if possible... how to do it?
I hope this is more clear, and my apologies for not explaining the point of why I want to connect a physical drive to a vm.